Good News: You can join the restoration revolution with a Healthy Yard!

By making a few changes to your landscaping practices, you can help restore ecological health to our local, shared environment. 

Steps to a Healthy Yard

• Speak to your landscaper about your concerns and goals for a healthier year. With some discussion we've found that many are willing to alter their service plans to accomdate.

• reduce or elminate synthetic chemicals on your lawn, including fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides

• reduce leaf blowing by moving whole leaves into planting beds instead of blowingt them away for pick up

• shrink your lawn where possible: lawn provides no ecological benefit

• add native plants

• remove invasive species, which spread rapidly, don’t support local wildlife, and crowd out and kill native species

• add keystone plants, which support a huge portion of local animal species; these include oaks, and cherries (not ornamental cherries, we’re talking about native cherry species)

• Reconsier your mosquito and tick fogger: the majority of products are not considered safe and the better defense is increasing the biodiversity in your garden so that mosquitoes are eaten by natural predators

• modify outdoor lights to reduce their number and redirect light downward; light pollution upsets the natural rhythm of insect populations and contributes to their declining numbers.

• if you see “worms” on your plants, don’t kill them! They are probably beneficial bugs, mostly likely caterpillars that may feed birds or other bugs or will eventually change into butterflies.

• if you see half-eaten leaves on your plants, celebrate! That’s a sign that caterpillars and other insects are eating them—the first sign of a healthy garden.

Why it's important?

In recent years, we’ve come to realize that traditional landscaping does not provide the ecoservices that we need all landscapes to provide. These include:

• support food webs by growing native plants that feed birds and insects. The leaves of non-native plants are often toxic to insects so they can’t lay their eggs on them and the emerging larvae can’t eat the leaves.

• sequester carbon by growing large native trees that capture and store carbon in their tree and root systems for hundreds of years

• clean and manage water by not using chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which are polluting our waterways

• plant native trees and shrubs with long root systems that draw water into the soil rather than allowing it to run off into storm sewer systems (as lawn does).

• support pollinators with plants and practices that restore and support their habitats.

All life, including human life, cannot survive without the little creatures that run the world. Insects:

• pollinator plants, which allows them to produce the nuts and fruits that we eat

• transfer energy from plants to animals, creating complex webs of interdependent species. Forexample, caterpillars eat leaves; birds and other animals eat caterpillars; and so on up the food chain.

• decompose dead things, turning them into soil and other organic matter that continues the circle of life.